This passage from @benjamincarterhett.bsky.social's book on Hitler's rise to power has long haunted me for the way it describes how so many ordinary Germans had their minds & souls gradually rewired by the changing political climate of the 1930s. Watching something similar happen here is terrifying.
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https://dutchmilitaria.com/product/german-wwii-radio-volksempfanger-ve-301-dyn-1938/
It’s called “Scapegoat Psychology”
Erich Neumann, lifelong Zionist, Neumann fled Nazi Germany with his family and settled in Tel Aviv in 1934,
where he would become the founding father of analytical psychology in the future state of Israel. …
*
https://sites.google.com/view/somnus/psychoanalysis/erich-neumann
Arendt approached this question in her conceptualizing of “fearful imagination.”
The roots of radical thoughtlessness are latent in the human.
Peeling back the layers of first-person "this is how I justified..." is good-brutal.
The 1st-person grappling is arresting.
(religious note, allusions are Genesis)
https://open.substack.com/pub/elizabethglassturner/p/about-that-poem-martin-niemoller?r=lsaf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
"Thinking about the end of the Weimar Rep in this way--as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality..."
Channeling Carl Sagan.
That's precisely why the rise of fascism among us, in spite of their example, is doubly contemptible.
It's markedly different to how Germans and Austrians reacted to Hitler.
Supporters praise lawless deportation and dehumanization
It is happening here and now
He is almost entirely responsible for creating the conditions for a Trump to happen.
And I was deeply afraid. That moment has not passed. It has deepened.
A nation which is civilized, law-abiding, and cultured is a sitting duck for men like Hitler and Trump. The citizenry cannot imagine the uncivilized, lawless, & uncouth nature of these psychopathic men.
Tell citizens they’re “saving their values”, & they’ll do anything.
However, the Germans murdered 100k in Belgium simply because they wouldn’t give them rights to pass thru enroute to murder the French during WWI.
Someone was wrong in the culture long before 1933?
And Belgium? There's this Congo thing to take into consideration.
A great many Germans - particularly in the Wehrmacht's senior officer class - had participated in massacres or stood by or rationalised them away afterwards.
https://archive.org/details/reflectionsofnaz00frie/page/n8/mode/1up